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PR Agency Reputation
Interactive Dashboard

Public Relations Agency
Reputation Update
PR's reputation continues to suffer in the blogosphere.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Here's the latest update from KDPaine & Partners' on-going analysis of the blogosphere reputations of the top ten public relations firms. See below to link to a dashboard for each agency and summary charts for all agencies combined. Plus you can create new charts and view the data that goes into them.

Background

KDPaine & Partners has been analyzing the reputations of the top ten PR firms in the blogosphere since the beginning of June. (See our previous installment in this series here.) All postings (in both the blog body and comments) that mention one or more of these firms are collected. Each one is categorized by topic and rated on tonality -- as positive (i.e. it leaves the reader more likely to hire or go to work for the firm), negative (leaves the reader less likely to hire or go to work for the firm) or balanced.

Recent Coverage

Summary: The intensity of recent negative coverage (Edelman's blunders with Microsoft and Wal-Mart) has eased somewhat, but there is considerably more hostility towards PR firms now than there was back in the summer.

Overall Edelman continues to dominate the discussion, but the following chart illustrates the importance of analyzing accurately for tonality. At first glance, the marketing or PR person at Edelman might be congratulated for dominating the discussion all fall. And clearly Edelman is on the rise, at the expense of Ketchum, Fleishman, Burson and H&K. Only Weber Shandwick saw any sort of significant gain in the last seven months:

Share of Blog Body Coverage Over Time
(click on the chart to see it larger)

However, if we isolate the negative coverage, we see that very little of this discussion would leave a client more likely to do business with Edelman. The following chart shows each agency's share of negative coverage by week. The red is Edelman.

Negative Blog Body Coverage Over Time
(click on the chart to see it larger)

The good news for Burson and H&K is that Edelman's blunders seem to have taken the focus away from their issues.

On the positive side, there's not nearly as much volume. However Ogilvy's Dove campaign and the bloggers who felt that it was okay for Edelman to send out PCs dominated the discussion. There was also a fair amount of positive discussion generated by various high profile searches for new agencies of record, including Wal-Mart, Sony and Microsoft.

Positive Blog Body Coverage Over Time
(click on the chart to see it larger)

Of greater concern to the industry should be the growth in the discussion of ethics, mostly negative, relative to the industry as a whole. As the following chart indicates, while bloggers questioned the business practices of agencies all along, only in the last three months have the ethics of the industry been a major part of the discussion.

Unfavorable Discussion by Issues Over Time
(click on the chart to see it larger)

To determine which blogs are most influential to the industry, we calculated their conversation index – the ratio of comments to posts. Here are the results:

Conversation Index
(click on the chart to see it larger)

Agency Blog Interactive Dashboard

To see the data discussed above in interactive dashboards for each agency, use this link to go to www.diydashboard.com. Follow these instructions:

• Click on the link above, or here, and you will be taken to the KDPaine & Partners' Do-It-Yourself Dashboard introduction page.
• Log in as "guest" and use the password "KDPaine".
• In the page that appears, use the pull down menu at the top left to select the "PR CGM" dashboard.
• This will open a landing page that lists the different charts that are available for the agency blog data.
• You can change the date range to view whatever months you are interested in. Click on the individual bars of any chart to read the actual postings from which the data was coded.

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